Symbiopoiesis

Changing the World the Poietic Way

The universe is not outside of you.

Look inside yourself; everything that you want, you already are.

〰 Rumi 〰

image © Elena Mozhvilo & Markus Spiske on Unsplash

The 'Creation' of a Human World

This whole creation is essentially subjective, and the dream is the theatre where the dreamer is at once: scene, actor, prompter, stage manager, author, audience, and critic.

〰 Carl Gustav Jung 〰

Despite a negligible success rate, 'creation' techniques enjoy an irresistible appeal.

Their charm lies in the promise of giving us the power to change our circumstances, when the life we are living doesn’t live up to our expectations, childhood dreams, or the ideal images dangled in front of our noses in the form of photo-shopped profiles of ‘influencers’, or even AI generated androids.

That’s ok, as long as we know that real life is not a Disney fairytale. Everyone can do with a little assistance from a magic dragon, or fairy godmother, or chatbot once in a while.

However ~ creation craze can spell trouble when thrown into the alchemical cauldron of spiritual materialism, stirred into a murky mix of manifestation mania, and sold as ‘true work of creation’.

There is no doubt that humans are ‘creators’. Every human has the potential to ‘create’ their own experience in any moment ~ in theory. The practice looks very different, as we all know, for too many reasons to list here.

Far too many humans don’t have the power to ‘create’ anything at all ~ too busy struggling to survive, too busy fleeing from a war, or starvation, or domestic abuse, or a life threatening illness, or caught up in the 9-5 job-race.

Potential and power, although very similar assets, and closely related words in principle, can be worlds apart.

The verbiont ‘creator’ and her siblings are set in quotation marks, because these words have connotations which give the impression (on the alleged positive side) that humans can bring into existence anything they want. As if humans are god-like super beings who can make anything happen by superhuman decree.

Creation-words used in reference to negative events give the impression as if humans are solely responsible for their suffering, and therefore only have themselves to blame when things go wrong.

Both scenarios are absurd. They are self-destructive left-overs from the conviction of Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), a philosopher, Lord Chancellor of England, and mega-influencer of scientific methods and philosophical thinking from the late Tudor period (2nd half of the 16th century) to the so-called Age of Enlightenment (17th to 18th century).

Bacon believed that humans are ‘born to subdue nature and make her our slave.’ He is remembered for making grand prophecies about nature being “bound into service, hounded in her wanderings and put on the rack and tortured for her secrets.”

He also argued that “scientific knowledge can only be based upon inductive reasoning and careful observation of events in nature.”

The Baconian mindset is the incubator of the body of thought which feeds contemporary science, politics, the military-industrial-complex, and mind-over-matter-theories to this day!

What’s conveniently forgotten is that Bacon’s political career came to a disgraceful end, when he was charged with corruption and ‘committed to the Tower of London at the King’s pleasure’.

Such snippets of historic information ~ and their uncanny parallels to corruption in high places in the present post-truth-era ~ can be used as a basis for inductive reasoning, leading to the careful observation that Bacon’s wistful view of ‘human powers over nature’ is rather out of sync with reality.

Simultaneously, it also helps us appreciate the depth of the roots of unsustainable Anthropocentric ways of thinking, which have been threatening our natural symbiosphere for centuries, and which are a serious threat to our ecosystem and survival on our Motherplanet right now.

Apart from encouraging generations of greedy supremacists to exploit our planet, regardless of the devastating effects on nature, Bacon’s prophecies have not only proven fallacious, they have misguided humanity towards self-destruction.

Is this the world we have ‘created’?

I always thought ‘creation’ means intentionally ‘bringing something into existence’, rather than wrecking, slaughtering, raping and murdering living creation out of existence.

Or as Marianne Williamson says in her recent morning meditation, "Our worldly parents might have been wonderful people or they might have been scoundrels, but the larger point is that they’re not who created us. Superman was only raised by those nice people in Kansas.”

photo © Paddy O’Sullivan

The Gravy Train of ‘Manifestation’

To the Daoists, the Image is the inner form of things,

the primal idea from which physical reality later manifests.

〰  Kenneth S. Cohen 〰

Manifestation techniques, unfortunately, are often driven by the unsavoury Baconian mindset. They carry the implicit assumption that we are endowed with a supernatural mental power, which empowers › qualifies ›› entitles us to ››› get whatever we want… and because we have this alleged power called ‘creation’, we are entitled ›››› if not called by some ostensible ‘divine right’ ››››› to make use of it.

Let’s take a look at the gravy train (= colloquialism to describe a way to achieve great material success with minimal or no effort) of manifestation.

Manifest [from Latin manifestus = clear, evident, plainly apprehensible] used as an adjective in English since late 14 c. in the sense of “clearly revealed to the eye or the understanding, open to view or comprehension”; evident, apparent, obvious.

The verb to manifest, arriving hand in hand with the adjective, carried the meaning “to spread” (one's fame), “to show plainly” based on the Latin manifestare = to discover, disclose, betray.

The noun manifestation ~ adopted in English in early 15 c. ~ held the meaning of “action of disclosing what is secret, obscure, or unseen; exhibition, demonstration,” based on the same Latin verb.

From 1785 the noun embraced a second meaning of “an object, action, or presence by which something is made manifest.”

The adverb manifest as used here holds the same sense as the adjective: evident, apparent, obvious. In other words, until the late 18th century, manifestation is still an action (or object/ presence) to make things obvious which are already in existence.

By 1853 a third meaning emerged of “phenomena by which the presence of a spirit or ghost is supposed to be rendered perceptible.” This definition grew out of a spiritualist context and was later used as a synonym for materialisation.

The Latin manifestus = plainly apprehensible, clear, apparent, evident related to criminal offenses which could be proved by direct evidence as well as offenders, who were caught redhanded.

The first part of the Latin word [manus = hand] must be understood as a way of ‘involving the hand’ to make something evident. Manifest, in its early sense, is therefore a form of ‘seeing with the hand’.

The second part of the word [festus] is open to debate. Etymological connections with the word infest [Latin infestare = to attack, disturb, trouble] would suggest an action of physical ‘grabbing’ to make something visible and tangible.

photo © Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash

Symbiogenesis, the Principle of Natural Creation

All the complex life forms that we see were formed through symbiogenesis.

〰 Lynn Margulis 〰

Natural ‘creation’ is based on the principle of symbiogenesis [from Greek sym = together + bios = life + genesis = origin, creation, birth]. Symbiogenesis literally means coming into being alive together.

Symbiogenesis is based on the theory that nothing in life comes into being by itself. Every human, for example, comes into earthly existence through a collaboration of two living cells. As soon as the two cells connect with each other in a fertile bond, synergy kicks in (Greek syn = together + ergon = work).

Synergy is the interaction of countless phenomena and expressions of life, where the result ends up being far more than the sum of its parts. Everything in nature, including humans, comes into being in this way. This is what we call ‘genuine creation’.

Based on the principle of symbiogenesis, you are a ‘work of creation’, and everything you do is a ‘work of creation’. You are a ‘creator’, continuously ‘creating’ your life.

However, because the words |creation|, |creator| and |create| are overloaded with connotations of the Baconian mindset and misleading manifestation theories*, we cannot use them without the risk of confusion.

(*while certain techniques themselves may be constructive, the underlying mindset can counteract the results.)

To understand the generic role of humans and find our constructive symbiogenic place within our natural environment we need a new language. Using the old terminology in the old sense keeps us stuck in the Anthropocentric paradigm.

To promote the new era of the Symbiocene, we must shift into a radically different way of thinking, beyond hierarchy and human supremacy over nature.

The principle of symbiogenesis applies to every living creature, including individual humans, natural forests, and planet Earth herself. Every living organism within a larger organisation is a symbiont, fulfilling a unique function.

The symbiogenic organisation is built on heterarchy rather than hierarchy. No symbiont can be regarded as ‘more important’ or ‘more intelligent’ than others. If a symbiont is more powerful than others, and uses their power to subdue and destroy their own biosphere, that is hardly a sign of ‘intelligence’ but indicates depravity and serious sickness.

According to cultural philosopher Jean Gebser, human Consciousness is currently going through a degenerative phase, manifesting in the spectrum of self-destructive activities we can witness today.

On the brighter side, every symbiogenic living organism continuously regenerates itself ~ a phenomenon called autopoiesis by Chilean scientists Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana. (The term autopoiesis was coined in 1972)

Autopoiesis [from Greek auto = self + poiēsis = creation] has been defined as the ability of a living organism to self-organise. Varela and Maturana showed that living organisms have the power to produce and sustain themselves by creating their own environment through acts of knowing.

The theory of the two Chilean biologists caused quite a stir in scientific circles 40 years ago, and has been embraced by various branches of science, including sociology, cognitive science, and systems theory.

In Autopoiesis and Cognition (1980), Maturana and Varela argue that the process of cognition is coextensive with the process of life. “Living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition. This statement is valid for all organisms, with and without a nervous system.”

The evolutionary theory of symbiogenesis was developed in parallel by Lynn Margulis based on an earlier proposal by Russian botanist Boris Mikhaylovich Kozo-Polyansky.

When applying the concept of autopoiesis to human Consciousness as a living organism, we need to take symbiogenesis into consideration too. As hosts of our individual Consciousness we might not be content to let our own organism simply ‘do its own thing, regenerating itself through cognitive processes’.

What if we are stuck in survival mechanisms due to trauma? We might need and want to engage in that regenerative processing in a creative way and heal old unprocessed experiences.

To capture this intentional cognitive engagement with the natural processes of autopoiesis and symbiogenesis I suggest a new term: Symbiopoiesis can serve as a replacement for the anthropocentric terms ‘creation’, or ‘manifestation’ (according to materialistic neospiritualism).

Symbiopoiesis [from Greek sym = together + bios = life poiēsis = creation, the art of making] literally means engaging in the creative process together with life.

Symbiopoiesis is an intelligent and creative way of participating in the regenerative symbiogenic process of nature, using all Faculties and channels of perception of human Consciousness.

A poiētēs in Ancient Greece was considered a ‘maker, composer, human creator engaged in productive formative action’.

In the Century Dictionary of 1895 the English word poet is defined as “one endowed with the gift and power of imaginative invention and creation, attended by corresponding eloquence of expression, commonly but not necessarily in a metrical form.”

Poet was used in 14c English, as in classical languages, in reference to all writers or composers of works of literature. In 16c.-17c. often as maker.

To promote the shift from the degenerative phase of human Consciousness towards a more sustainable future in the Symbiocene, I am introducing the following three new words to replace the anthropocentric terms related to ‘creation’ and ‘manifestation’.

Symbiopoiesis ~ conscientious engagement in the creative process in synergy with the self-organising life-force and rooted in symbiocentric principles.

symbiopoet ~ a person practicing symbiopoiesis, human engaging in their own life in a symbiopoietic way.

symbiopoietic ~ adjective describing the process of symbiopoiesis; the quality of transforming life through symbiopoiesis.

Please note: there is no verb in this word family. Symbiopoiesis is not something any human can 'do' as an 'act of free will' ~ independent from nature, or manipulating nature.

Personal circumstances, innate potential, and the forces of life itself need to conspire and act in synergy with the individual who is actively engaged in the process ~ much like in the act and process of giving birth to a child. An appropriate verb capturing this action would be to symbiogenerate [from Greek sym = together + bios = life + genesis = origin, creation, birth].